Are you building a ladder that ends three feet short of the roof you need to reach? It is a question that most people do not want to ask when they are signing a check for six figures and it is the only question that matters when the power goes out or the bill stays high.
We like to think we are buying a tool for the future but we are often just buying a monument to the way things used to be. I spent the first half of my morning today walking around with my fly open and nobody told me until I saw it in a mirror and that is exactly how it feels to find out your energy plan was built for a business that no longer exists.
You feel a bit foolish and you wonder why the person you paid to look at your setup did not say a word about the obvious gap between what you are doing and what you are about to do.
The Designer with the Tablet
Gus owns a plant that makes parts for trucks and his floor is a loud place full of heat and the smell of cut steel. He invited a man to come out and look at his roof because the power bills were eating his profit and the man came with a tablet and a clean shirt.
This designer was very good at reading what had already happened and he took the bills from the last year and he put them into a computer and he showed Gus a graph of a perfect world. The graph showed the sun coming up and the costs going down and it looked like a map of a land where nothing ever changes.
Gus stood there in the heat and he pointed to a spot on the floor where the concrete was being cut out and he told the man that a second furnace was coming in . It was a big machine and it would pull more power than anything else in the shop and it was already paid for. The designer nodded and he smiled and then he went back to his tablet and he did not write a word about the furnace because the furnace was not on the bill from .
A business is a moving thing but a load profile is just a still photograph of a moment that has already passed. If you only look at the photo you will miss the train that is coming down the track and you will build a system that is too small before the last bolt is even tight.
The man with the tablet was looking for a quick sale and he wanted the numbers to look easy and he wanted the math to stay simple. If he put the second furnace into the math then the system would have to be bigger and the wires would have to be thicker and the talk with the power company would be harder. He stayed with the easy present and he let the future become a blind spot that would cost Gus a lot of money in the years to come.
The Breath and the Burning Room
My friend Echo H.L. is a mindfulness instructor and she says that when you watch the breath you must also watch the room where the breathing happens. She means that you cannot just look at one small thing and think you know the whole story.
“If you look at the breath but the room is on fire then you are not being mindful and you are just being blind.”
– Echo H.L., Mindfulness Instructor
Most people who sell panels are only looking at the breath of the utility bill and they do not look at the room where the factory is growing and the machines are humming. They sell a product instead of an engineering plan and the result is a system that works for a factory that is already gone.
When the Furnace Lands
When the new furnace finally landed it was a Tuesday and the power draw spiked and the system that Gus bought could not keep up. The panels were working hard but the pipes were too small and the grid connection was not set for that kind of load.
Gus had to go back and pay more for more wires and more work and he lost the money he thought he was saving. The designer was gone by then and he had his commission and he was looking at some other bill for some other man who was also about to grow out of his own skin. It is a slow motion wreck that happens every day in the world of commercial solar and it starts with a man who does not know how to listen to what is coming.
Extra cost to fix the undersized wiring.
Actual (31%) vs. Promised (84%) offset.
The real-world financial friction of “simple” math in a complex environment.
The Engineer’s Eyes
You have to look at the trajectory of the place and you have to talk about the plans for next year and the year after that. If you are going to put in electric trucks or if you are going to add a new line of machines then those things are more important than what you did in .
An engineer looks at the world differently than a salesman and the engineer wants to know the limits of the site and the strength of the roof and the size of the transformer out on the street. They want to know the levelized cost of energy over and not just the price of the panels today. They know that a cheap system that does not fit your growth is the most expensive thing you will ever buy.
The furnace is a concrete noun and it is heavy and it pulls current like a vacuum and it does not care about your pretty graphs. If you do not plan for the furnace then the furnace will eat your return on investment and it will leave you with a system that is just a very expensive hat for your building.
I keep thinking about my fly being open and how I was so sure I was ready for the day and yet I was missing the most basic part of the job. It is easy to get lost in the high level talk of carbon and credits and forget that at the end of the day you are just trying to run a shop and keep the lights on without going broke.
Design Phase vs. Cutting Corners
We see this a lot when we look at how people try to save money by cutting corners on the design phase. They want to get to the part where the panels are on the roof and the meter is spinning backward and they skip the hard talk about the next five years.
They treat it like buying a box of soap when it is actually more like heart surgery for your business. You want the person with the knife to know exactly how much blood you are going to pump when you start running and you do not want them to guess based on how you look while you are asleep on the table.
Gus ended up calling someone else to fix the mess and he had to spend another $18,240 just to get the wires right for the load he knew was coming all along. He was lucky he had the cash to fix it but most people do not have that kind of buffer.
They get stuck with a system that covers 31% of their needs instead of the 84% they were promised and they wonder why they even bothered. The trust is broken and the math is dead and the sun keeps shining on panels that are not doing the job they were meant to do.
It takes a certain kind of person to sit down and ask the uncomfortable questions about what happens next. It takes a person who is not afraid of a complex answer and who knows that a business that is not growing is a business that is dying. You need to find the person who writes down the word furnace when you say it and who asks you how big it is and how often it runs. You need the person who looks at the bones of the building and the guts of the electrical room before they ever show you a price.
Look at the Floor
If you are looking at your roof today and you are thinking about making a change then I want you to stop and look at your plans for the next three years. Forget the bill for a minute and look at the floor of the shop and look at the empty spaces where new things will go.
Those empty spaces are the most important parts of the design and they are the parts that the bad designers will ignore because they are hard to model. They are the parts that make the difference between a system that saves you and a system that just sits there.
I went home and I zipped up my pants and I thought about Gus and his furnace and I felt better about my morning. A missing zipper is a small mistake that you can fix in a second but a missing machine in a solar plan is a mistake that stays with you for a generation.
It is better to have the hard talk now and it is better to look at the whole room and it is better to build for the business you are becoming. The sun is not going anywhere and the grid is only getting more expensive and your growth should not be the thing that breaks your heart.
The Story About the Future
When you sit down with an engineer they will talk about the load and the peak and the base and they will not just talk about the savings. They will tell you when the answer is no and they will tell you when the system needs to be bigger even if it costs more today.
That is the kind of talk that builds a future and that is the kind of talk that keeps the furnace running without breaking the bank. You want the man who looks at the crate in the corner and asks what is inside and you want the man who knows that a bill is just a story about the past.
Build for the machine you haven’t bought yet and you will never have to worry about the roof you already have.